Why Informatica Has Been Named a Leader in the 2020 Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management Solutions by Gartner for the 5th Consecutive Year

Gartner recently published its 2020 Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management Solutions, naming Informatica as a Leader for the fifth consecutive year.[1] Gartner has positioned Informatica at the highest and furthest overall position for our ability to execute and completeness of vision.

The key questions to ask are – what’s happening in the market that led to such a significant change in the Magic Quadrant Leaders Quadrant  this year? And what is the reason for Informatica’s ongoing Leader recognition?

Trusted Data – Enabled by Metadata Management – Is More Important Than Ever

The pace of digital transformation has accelerated as organizations move from just modernization of their infrastructure to real digital transformation – to create new products and services, build new customer engagement models, and embrace new operating models and business models. Even in the middle of the global pandemic – and in some cases because of it – leaders are increasing their digital investments, ramping up their AI initiatives, and embracing a multi-cloud strategy. As they accelerate these data-driven business transformations, they are turning to trusted data for answers more than ever before, and they need to make this trusted data easily available to data consumers across the organization. Trusted data drives trusted insights for decision-making and creates sustainable competitive advantage, while reducing risks.  In this new digital era, the scale, automation and trust required to enable data-driven transformation can only be achieved with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities. And enterprise-scale metadata management and metadata-driven intelligence and automation are the keys to turning this into reality.

4 Metadata Management Requirements That Are Changing the Industry

Now let’s unpack that statement and look into why metadata management is critical. As digital transformation becomes more pervasive, we now have more business-critical data, more distribution of data across a multi-cloud environment, more data consumers clamoring for trusted data, and more regulations that require responsible use of data than ever before. 

Metadata helps us untangle this complexity by adding context to data, enabling discovery and understanding of data across a complex, multi-cloud data landscape. As we have worked closely with our customers on their data-driven transformation journeys, we have realized that delivering value at scale from metadata management is not possible without the following:

1. A breadth of metadata management capabilities across established and emerging multi-cloud infrastructures;
2. Depth of metadata management capabilities to deliver value for all business use cases and address the needs of all types of data users;
3. Enterprise scale, with the ability to support millions of data assets and hundreds of millions of metadata assets; and
4. Critically, the need for metadata to be overlaid with machine learning intelligence, augmented with human knowledge, and integrated, making all cloud data management processes intelligent and dynamic.

Increasingly, point solutions that cater to specific use cases or types of users are not able to scale and deliver the agility, extensibility, intelligence and automation that true digital transformation demands. Organizations looking to harness the power of their data need a collaborative, enterprise-wide approach to metadata management – an approach that’s scalable, modular, intelligent and automated, and accounts for the global increase in data, regulations and the unique needs of user communities to truly empower value creation.   

Now let’s look at our perspective on how Informatica has maintained its Leader position over the years by delivering on these requirements. Informatica has been in the vanguard in recognizing the value of metadata management and metadata-driven intelligence for the modern digital era. We introduced CLAIRE, the industry’s first and only unified metadata-driven AI engine, as the foundation of our Intelligent Data Platform more than three years ago. This pioneering innovation  has allowed Informatica to deliver the industry’s only intelligent, integrated, modular enterprise metadata management solutions for all business use cases.

Innovations in Metadata Management in 2020

In 2020, we have continued to build on this with industry-leading innovations for both common and new, unique use cases. Some of the highlights of our 2020 innovations include:

• Data Cataloging: the industry’s first and only catalog of catalogs with the broadest and deepest metadata connectivity and lineage, and intelligent metadata knowledge graph for comprehensive data discovery across multi-cloud and on-premises.
• Data Governance: the industry’s first intelligent and automated data marketplace to enable governed data democratization and drive business value with trusted data.
• Security and Risk: industry’s most complete, intelligent, automated risk management solution to operationalize the full spectrum of policy, discovery, subject registry, risk analysis, and remediation (protection) controls within a single integrated platform.
• Data Value: the industry’s first automated framework for understanding, measuring and optimizing data asset value.
• Cloud-Native Data Integration: the industry’s only cloud-native data integration for cloud analytics and cloud data management powered by metadata-driven intelligence and automation.

In addition, Informatica has continued to add more depth to its metadata management critical capabilities through strategic acquisitions and ongoing innovation. The acquisitions of Compact Solutions and GreenBay Technologies have strengthened Informatica’s current expertise  in metadata connectivity, and metadata-driven AI and automation. These extended capabilities enable Informatica customers to catalog and govern virtually all types of enterprise data, including complex enterprise systems, across cloud and on-premises. Our customers are leveraging these capabilities to unleash value with trusted data from a wide range of information infrastructures, including major cloud ecosystems like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Snowflake. Informatica also continues to push the frontiers on innovation with recent patents for ROI guided decision-making through AI-driven data risk exposure analytics.

Metadata Management Customer Successes

Of course, nothing speaks louder than the value that our customers are realizing from our solutions in advancing their data-driven business transformations. These deployments at enterprise scale – often with tens of millions of metadata assets and even over 100 million metadata assets in some cases – span all industry verticals, geographies and business use cases.

Invesco empowers their data consumers to deliver business value with trusted data from their cloud data warehouse. In order to make more informed, data-driven decisions, the team turns to our Intelligent Data Governance solution to catalog metadata and intelligently connect business context for deeper understanding. They recently shared their story on a webinar that I would encourage you to watch.

In addition, UNC Health is working with our Intelligent Data Governance solution, featuring Axon Data Governance and Enterprise Data Catalog. According to Rachini Ahmadi-Moosavi, Executive Director of Analytical Services & Data Governance at UNC Health, “Having the right tools to enhance data governance really helped our health system understand the impacts of COVID-19, and provide clear and concise information to help facilitate decision-making.” Read about their journey in this success story.

Lastly, Generali accelerated data governance processes while saving time for their data owners and data stewards by automating previously manual processes for analytics with our Intelligent Data Governance solutions. According to Victor Garcia, Data Governance Leader of Generali Spain, “Informatica Axon Data Governance helps us feed our analytics models with trusted, governed data to meet the high expectations of the business and our customers for digital transformation.” Learn even more in their success story.

We would like to thank all of our customers for the trust and confidence they have vested in us, without which we wouldn’t deserve this great honor. Their success serves as a testament to what we believe is another reason for this recognition: our deep understanding of the business requirements for robust, enterprise-class metadata management and our innovative end-to-end solutions that drive value for all business use cases.

Please take a moment to download your complimentary copy and learn why Gartner has again recognized Informatica as a Leader  in its 2020 Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management Solutions.

^{[1]Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management Solutions, Guido De Simoni, Mark Beyer, Ankush Jain, Alan Dayley, 11 November 2020.}

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